Bypass attachments and homotopy classes of 2-plane fields in contact topology
For a contact \(3\)-manifold \((M,\xi)\) with convex boundary and a Legendrian arc \(\alpha\subset\partial\,M\), the composition \(\Delta_\alpha=\sigma_\alpha*\sigma_{\alpha'}*\sigma_{\alpha}\) of three bypass attachments along Legendrian arcs \(\alpha\), \(\alpha'\), and \(\alpha\) is called a bypass triangle attachment along \(\alpha\). It is interesting to study how bypass attachments affect the homotopy type of the contact structure on a given contact manifold with convex boundary, and to check how this operation changes the homotopy class of the underlying \(2\)-plane field distribution.NEWLINENEWLINEIn this paper, the author shows how a bypass triangle attachment affects the homotopy type of the contact structure. For a compact oriented \(3\)-manifold with boundary, let \(\xi\) and \(\xi'\) be two co-oriented contact structures on \(M\) such that \(\xi=\xi'\) in the complement of an open ball \(B^3\subset\text{int}\,(M)\). Using the framed cobordism construction, a slight generalization of the Pontryagin-Thom construction, to the case of compact manifolds with boundary, the author defines a three-dimensional obstruction class \(o_3(\xi,\xi')\in\mathbb Z/d(\xi)\), where \(d(\xi)\) is the divisibility of the Euler class \(e(\xi)=e'(\xi)\in H^2(M,\mathbb Z)\), and uses it to distinguish the homotopy classes of \(\xi\) and \(\xi'\). The author proves that if \((M,\xi)\) is a contact manifold with convex boundary, and \(\xi'\) is the contact structure obtained from \(\xi\) by attaching a bypass triangle on \(\partial\,M\), then \(o_3(\xi,\xi')=-1\), and \(\xi'\) is not homotopic to \(\xi\) relative to the boundary as \(2\)-plane field distributions.
This page was built for publication: Bypass attachments and homotopy classes of 2-plane fields in contact topology
Report a bug (only for logged in users!)Click here to report a bug for this page (MaRDI item Q462180)
